“No—no, I’m afraid she isn’t. Not now. She left there about—let me see—half an hour ago. She hasn’t got home?”

“No—she hasn’t. It’s only ten minutes’ walk. Where can she be?”

“Perhaps she’s called in on one of your neighbours?”

“I’ve rung them up—all of them. She’s not there. I’m frightened, Inspector.”

“So am I,” thought Craddock.

He said quickly:

“I’ll come round to you—at once.”

“Oh, do—there’s a piece of paper. She was writing on it before she went out. I don’t know if it means anything … It just seems gibberish to me.”

Craddock replaced the receiver.

Miss Blacklock said anxiously:

“Has something happened to Miss Marple? Oh, I hope not.”

“I hope not, too.” His mouth was grim.

“She’s so old—and frail.”

“I know.”

Miss Blacklock, standing with her hand pulling at the choker of pearls round her neck, said in a hoarse voice:

“It’s getting worse and worse. Whoever’s doing these things must be mad, Inspector—quite mad….”

“I wonder.”

The choker of pearls round Miss Blacklock’s neck broke under the clutch of her nervous fingers. The smooth white globules rolled all over the room.

Letitia cried out in an anguished tone.

“My pearls—my pearls—” The agony in her voice was so acute that they all looked at her in astonishment. She turned, her hand to her throat, and rushed sobbing out of the room.

Phillipa began picking up the pearls.

“I’ve never seen her so upset over anything,” she said. “Of course—she always wears them. Do you think, perhaps, that someone special gave them to her? Randall Goedler, perhaps?”

“It’s possible,” said the Inspector slowly.

“They’re not—they couldn’t be—real by any chance?” Phillipa asked from where, on her knees, she was still collecting the white shining globules.

Taking one in his hand, Craddock was just about to reply contemptuously, “Real? Of course not!” when he suddenly stifled the words.

After all, could the pearls be real?

They were so large, so even, so white that their falseness seemed palpable, but Craddock remembered suddenly a police case where a string of real pearls had been bought for a few shillings in a pawnbroker’s shop.

Letitia Blacklock had assured him that there was no jewellery of value in the house. If these pearls were, by any chance, genuine, they must be worth a fabulous sum. And if Randall Goedler had given them to her—then they might be worth any sum you cared to name.

They looked false—they must be false, but—if they were real?